Learning Things - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 50

Once you start pressing buttons, you are going to start figuring
things out. The arrows on the D-Pad correspond to the movement of
the player on the screen—one button jumps, the other doesn't seem
to do anything. You will later figure out that these buttons make you
run faster when held down, throw fireballs, and the like. You might
say, “Matthew, you told us discovery learning doesn't work,” and most
of the time it doesn't. If you sit and wait at the start screen, you will
see a demo of what Mario is capable of doing—he runs, jumps, col-
lects things, and the like. This is called a worked example, which is a
facet of the earlier discussed cognitive load theory. Essentially, seeing
an expert do something provides a mental framework for you to fol-
low. Alternatively, you could see it as an expert example, a facet of a
teaching style known as cognitive apprenticeship. You imitate your
mother when you learn to walk; you will try to imitate Mario ™ with
the controls. Each time you either make a mistake or do something
correctly, the feedback maps right back to our discussion on operant
conditioning. You are being reinforced to press the button and throw
the fireball. It looks cool; it makes a sound. Just like a child's mobile
hanging over his crib makes noises and lights when he plays with
it, the noise and light is often enough to reinforce the behavior and
provide motivation. If you need further evidence of this outside of
the scholarly realm, look no farther than a slot machine or pachinko
machine, whose flashing lights and popping sounds encourage coin-
drop. Children's toys that do nothing but make noise date back as far
as any of us can remember and continue to be popular.
Everything in Super Mario Bros. is brilliantly designed to moti-
vate you to learn to play. Early on, your failures are not punished
harshly—restarting the game is easy and fast and you can do it in a
heartbeat if you die a million times without getting very far. There
are warp zones to enable you to skip to a later level if you choose to
work your way through. The “score” mechanic in Super Mario Bros. is
virtually meaningless. Save for the Nintendo World Championships ™,
I can't remember a person who actually recorded their score in Super
Mario Bros. However, it provides an amazing opportunity to motivate
your players. The numbers are huge and ridiculous and clearly do not
correlate to anything. They feel amazing to amass, though, and as you
progress, you only get more and more of them.